I’m totally freaked by this. I don’t often check the spam box in my Outlook at work. But when I did, yesterday, there was, like, the report from the official work Spam filter. Click on the pic above for a full-size view, if you need proof of a sort. Really. I mean, like, how did it know? Not that I can ever be bothered to check the Quarantine report either, but still, if I wanted to, would I think to look for it in the spam bin? I think not.
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Are you the Jeremy Cherfas who wrote “Trees Have Made Man Upright” New Scientist 1983 93:172-178 ?
The creationists are claiming you wrote that Lucy had a talus that bent backward like a gorilla rather than forward like a human; forward being necesary to bipedalism.
I can’t get a hold of the article.
Do you know what you might have said relating to this? I am embroiled in mortal debate with a creationist, and he is invoking your article as evidence that Lucy couldn’t have been bipedal.
Please consider contacting me and setting me straight on this matter; I’d appreciate it much. Thanks.
-Colin
I am. email would be on its way if you had left yours, but you don’t seem to have.
I don’t have the NS article here. Whatever I did say, I was quoting someone else, being a reporter rather than a paleontologist. But what really ticks me off about any use of this sort of things by creationists is that there is absolutely no doubt that Lucy walked upright. None. Forget the talus and talk about the pelvis. In my book The Monkey Puzzle (with John Gribbin) and just about everything else I have written on the subject, this is said innumerable times. So why pick on one comment, almost certainly attributed to someone who was having an arcane argument with someone else (the stuff of news, and New Scientist) and ignore the rest? Because there’s nothing else they can do.